There may be black ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be
retributive and well deserved; but, that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.
You have stepped into quite a new character--you personify Retributive Justice now.--Your new protector, Mrs.
Retributive Justice, when it is no taller than you are, looks best in a chair."
Accordingly, convoking their chiefs, he inveighed against their craven policy, and urged the necessity of vigorous and
retributive measures that would check the confidence and presumption of their enemies, if not inspire them with awe.
Another prominent feature is the love of 'smart' dealing: which gilds over many a swindle and gross breach of trust; many a defalcation, public and private; and enables many a knave to hold his head up with the best, who well deserves a halter; though it has not been without its
retributive operation, for this smartness has done more in a few years to impair the public credit, and to cripple the public resources, than dull honesty, however rash, could have effected in a century.
Retributive. No pity!" was the conclusion of her silence.
He knew enough of the world to know that there is nothing in it better than the faithful service of the heart; so rendered and so free from any mercenary taint, he had such an exalted respect for it, that in the
retributive arrangements made by his own mind--we all make such arrangements, more or less-- he stationed Miss Pross much nearer to the lower Angels than many ladies immeasurably better got up both by Nature and Art, who had balances at Tellson's.
Bynoe, much rain, snow, blow much." This was evidently a
retributive punishment for wasting human food.
Determined to ascertain, if he could, through John Browdie, how the case really stood, he betook himself to his daily occupation: meditating, as he went, on a great variety of schemes for the punishment of the Yorkshire schoolmaster, all of which had their foundation in the strictest principles of
retributive justice, and had but the one drawback of being wholly impracticable.
"I'm sure, sister, I can't help myself," she said, urged by the fear lest her anticipated misfortunes might be held
retributive, to take comprehensive review of her past conduct.
Rawls, who elsewhere endorses a partially
retributive justification of punishment, (184) explicitly (but cursorily) dismisses the possibility that his critique of desert as a principle of distributive justice might extend to desert-based punishment.
How can that be good conduct?)
Retributive vs reformative justice